Google To Integrate Android Like Web-Intents in Chrome Apps!

Innovation, Intelligence and Implementation are best three which suits Google on whichever product you consider. As a company, Google never did partiality to any of its product, they treated every product equally and they never backed while given strong competition to their rivals.

Here comes one more awesome and innovative idea by Google Chrome team which can raise the boiling point of Browser war above their rivals!

Few months back Google opened a webstore for Chrome web –apps which made users to access their favourite sites within few clicks. Many of them replaced native Windows or Mac applications. For example, you can consider Tweetdeck and Angry Birds game.

But these web apps are completely disconnected or require the use of complicated APIs in order to make use of a third-party service, e.g., posting a comment to Twitter from your custom publishing domain. What if we could give sites the ability to leverage these services without any knowledge of the chosen service, except that it provides some set of predefined functionality?

To fix this problem, Google brought in Android application architecture in place and thought of consuming few of the components. If you are an Android application developer you would have already known about a component which connects two applications in Android, if not they you can have a read below 😉

Android OS has a component called Intents which is used to connect two applications without having in-depth knowledge on how other application has been coded. Intents is a facility for late run-time binding between components in the same or different applications.

In the Intents system, the client application requests a generic action, e.g. share, and specifies the data to pass to the selected service application. The user is given a list of applications which are registered so that they can handle the requested intent. The user-selected application is created in a new context and the data is passed sent from the client, the format of which is predefined for each specific intent type.

Well that shows clear picture how your Camera application on Android linked to Gallery. Isn’t it? When you take the same example for Chrome app, new photo hosting site could easily integrate editing functionality from something like Aviary or Picnik, without either of those services needing to implement a special API unique to that photo hosting site.

Yes, there are lots happening inside Google ecosystem and here is how they express their views,

We are hard at work designing an analogous system for the web: Web Intents. This web platform API will provide the same benefits of Android Intents, but better suited for web applications. When designing the system, we have first and foremost been interested in creating a simple, easy-to-use API. With Web Intents, you will be able to connect your web app to a service with as little as two lines of code! Chrome will perform the heavy lifting for you.

As with Android, Web Intents documents an initial set of intent actions (edit, view, share, etc.) that likely cover the majority of use cases on the web today; however, as the web grows and sites provide more functionality, new intent actions will be added by services that document these intents, some more popular than others. To foster development and use of intents, we plan to create a site to browse existing intents and add new intents.

That’s impressive! Isn’t it?

But here comes one more shocker for all of you. James Hawkins, Software Engineer at Google said,

Mozilla is also actively exploring this problem space. In fact we’re working closely with Mozilla engineers to unify our two proposals into one simple, useful API. Visit the examples page to try out the feature in any current browser. To explore using the API in your site, check out out the JavaScript shim, which provides an implementation of the API for browsers that have not implemented this feature. We are rapidly prototyping this feature, so check back soon for an announcement when Web Intents is available behind a flag in Chrome.

As Google said during I/O 2011, they are working towards unified ecosystem where each product works together which increases the ease of use!

Are you ready for Android like Apps within the fastest web browser? Is Google trying to extend their lead in Browsers war? Share your thoughts! Let’s discuss! 🙂

5 Comments

Abdul Rehman

bustedemotions96

I'm still waiting for Chrome and Android to converge. A full-fledged touchscreen-enabled Chrome browser for Android phones and tablets, and a ChromeOS that runs on top of Android and runs apps for netbooks. That's what Google needs to make happen.

I'm still waiting for Chrome and Android to converge. A full-fledged touchscreen-enabled Chrome browser for Android phones and tablets, and a ChromeOS that runs on top of Android and runs apps for netbooks. That's what Google needs to make happen.